Is it all about the buzzwords?
I knew I would be going to Mass today with the family, it was just a matter of which church. Fall Break meant not having any Religious Education classes either at home/parish or work/parish, so we went to a “neutral site” and got the chance to hear a deacon friend of mine preach and see how his pastor/boss ran things. Not bad!
Of course, it’s not bad either to occasionally “go and see” how other folks do the ministries of preaching and presiding, to hear how the music’s done by others, to see what gets put into the Bulletin. And if you work on a church staff, it always helps to shake the monotony out of your brain and engage a little creativity. But that’s not the only reason we chose to go south and not north.
I appreciate the fact that ministers spend a considerable chunk of time during the week composing, editing and practicing what gets delivered from the pulpit week after week. Having taken seminary Homiletics courses and having preached quite a few times myself for whatever reason, I know it’s a gift and challenge and risk to get “the message” out in a way that’s going to be heard by many (or not) and interpreted by many (or not). The situation that made me go elsewhere wasn’t so much because of delivery or length or even the person involved – it’s just that the subject matter at home/parish has gotten a bit narrowed down (for reasons I won’t go into here) and not in a good way.
It could be just me, but the material I’ve heard in the last weeks at home/parish hasn’t been so much about expanding on the Lectionary as it has been about making sure to mention certain…buzzwords. While some in the home/parish assembly choose to tune out until the Creed, or turn on their Blackberries, or make an effort to listen and “hang in there,” I just choose to play bingo with it. That’s my issue. But now that the “checklist” mentality has taken hold, I can only hope the Holy Spirit will step in and either give me a bit of empathy for the preacher or a bucketful of new charisma to the priests and deacons there.
Just as in the secular business world, buzzwords in preaching is a nasty trap for a minister or a congregation, but it’s a trap nonetheless. And I know it happens in more than a few Christian churches, even those not associated with the “hip-and-with-it” nondenominational churches which seem to thrive on buzzwords. Moving past buzzwords would have to take some real work, since a lot of the terms which could fill up the “Buzzword Bingo” card are necessary for providing a stable frame of reference and making scriptural passages more immediate and relevant to the listener. I do not envy the preacher who realizes that he’s in such a linguistic quagmire, but I do hope for his congregation’s sake that he finds the creativity to step out of it and into better preaching.
Fortunately, the preaching at work/parish pushes the buzzword-bitten stuff to the ground, kicks it around and calls it dirty names. But now I’m stuck with a quandary…How can I make an effort to change my own experience with the preaching, which happens to be one of the few things a layperson can’t touch, either for fear of terrible retribution or – well – nothing changing?
